


Alone

by kanonkita



Series: Inspired by Mission [1]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Childbirth, M/M, Mechpreg, Mpreg, mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-04-23 21:01:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14340822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kanonkita/pseuds/kanonkita
Summary: Starscream reflects on his life choices while he struggles to give birth solo.





	Alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Spoon888](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spoon888/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Mission](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6643972) by [Spoon888](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spoon888/pseuds/Spoon888). 



> After reading Mission, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head of what it was like for Starscream giving birth all alone and where he did it and so on and so forth. So, I started writing this, and Spoony said I should finish it up and post it. :B
> 
> Warning for graphic depictions of childbirth.

He wouldn’t scream. He had sworn to himself from the beginning that he wouldn’t scream, but it was a hard thing when the pain ripped through him for the umpteenth time. It was like being shot in the gut, if being shot in the gut also sent agonizing pain shooting round your back and down into your legs. Not to mention the frighteningly powerful stretching sensation from somewhere up in his valve.

Starscream leaned his head back against a crate and let a small sob escape his vocalizer. 

He had thought that it would be fine, that he could do this on his own. Surely, his programming would take care of the whole business. But how long had it been now since the first pains started? How long since the sudden rush of fluid and the quickening pains that had brought him to his knees? His chronometer told him that it had been half a cycle. It felt longer.

His body clenched down again, and Starscream groaned, kicking his thrusters against the floor of the storage room.

It wasn’t where he would have chosen to do this. He’d tried to haul himself back to his berthroom, but could never make it more than a few feet before another contraction hit him. At least the storage room would be easy to clean later.

The berthroom wasn’t where he would have chosen to do this either, though, he reflected as his cooling fans kicked into gears he hadn’t known they had in the aftermath of the latest surge. Not the storage room, not the berthroom, not anywhere on this rusty old freighter. He should have been on the  _ Nemesis _ , with a whole team of medics to ease his pain and take out his stress on, and his idiot trinemates fussing outside in the corridor, and Megatron…

Another contraction.

This time, he slid down off the crate and rolled onto his side, giving up on the idea of not screaming at last. Who would hear anyway, but for the tiny spark that had finally left his own chamber earlier that week? 

That had been the first sign that it was time he found somewhere to put down, somewhere with doctors who knew Cybertronian biology, but he had told himself it was too dangerous. He’d convinced himself that even the couple of safe havens he’d picked out for himself months ago would be crawling with bounty hunters, eager for a piece of the prize Megatron had laid on his head.

He’d convinced himself of a lot of things lately. One of the downsides of being alone was that there was no one to tell you if you were being irrational—no one to tell you that avoiding doctors was not going to prevent you going into labor.

He reached a shaking servo down to his valve and brought it back covered in energon. Was that normal? He knew that there would be an awful lot of energon involved, but was this amount of energon normal? Was it normal to be in labor for this long? Would he be okay laboring for so long without refueling? None of his scientific training held the answers. He’d put himself in danger with his own stubbornness, and that was nothing out of the ordinary. This time, though, he’d put someone else in danger—the only spark besides his own whose well-being actually mattered.

Why, oh, why hadn’t he just stayed on the slagging  _ Nemesis _ ? They could have worked something out, couldn’t they? He could’ve… what? Talked to Megatron? The thought almost made him laugh.

Yes, he could have talked to Megatron and let the tyrannical old warlord tear the tiny speck of light from his chest. Because there was no way Megatron would have wanted a sparkling, and especially not his.

More pain. This time, he thought he might have blacked out for a couple of kliks.

No, that was wrong. However many times he had repeated it to himself, he knew it wasn’t true. Deep down, he knew how badly Megatron wanted him, and he doubted that a sparkling would have changed that.

And that was why he had to leave.

Pain again. His shrieks and howls echoed through the empty halls and chambers of the old ship like a catacomb. His vents heaved and he kicked a thruster a bit too hard against the floor. A new pain burst through his pede and up his leg as the sensitive metal cracked. He focused in on it as if it could somehow lessen the rest of the agony.

Why hadn’t he just gotten rid of the sparkling himself? Carrier protocols? He doubted he really had them. Otherwise, he would have known what to do right now.

He’d definitely gotten something wrong; it couldn’t take this long to birth  _ one _ sparkling! Maybe he hadn’t been fueling himself enough? Maybe he’d been fueling himself too much and the sparkling had gotten too big? He had no idea.

So, why had he kept the pit-bound thing? Why had he given up everything—risked everything—to keep it safe?

There was an answer itching at the edge of his processor, but he pushed it away, unwilling to acknowledge its presence.

He reached a servo up to grip the edge of the crate again and started pulling himself into a squatting position. The simple act of moving himself had never been so difficult since that battle on Geratia when those Autobots had managed to ground and nearly chop him in half. He’d dispatched them, of course, but he could well remember trying to drag himself mangled and leaking across the battlefield, calling desperately for help through his fritzing comm. If that situation and this had one major difference, it was the pair of massive gray arms that had come out of nowhere to gather him up protectively and carry him to safety back then.

Megatron had muttered under his breath about wanting him alive to show him what he thought of careless soldiers who couldn’t watch their tails, but Starscream had already suspected his true reasons back then. 

He could still remember the first time that he’d looked into the old warlord’s optics and realized that what he was seeing there was not anger, scorn, disappointment, or even lust, but something much, much worse. It was on one of those rarest of occasions when Megatron was actually listening to Starscream’s ideas. The two of them were poring over starcharts and schematics together in one of the planning rooms, and Starscream couldn’t even remember what he’d said, but Megatron had laughed, and then so had he, and he’d looked over and the idiot had been looking at him in the way that every mech dreams of having someone look at him, and… 

Well, Starscream had said something rude and fled the room. Because the moment their optics met, something very much like what was reflected in Megatron’s had started to smolder in his own spark. And he’d known—he’d always known—that the second he gave in to those emotions, he would never be able to let go again. Every molecule of freedom he had ever known would be lost in the spark of a mech too old, too worn, and too brutal to feel so safe and so right.

Another contraction came, and this time, Starscream almost welcomed the distraction from the thoughts swirling in his processor. He bore down as hard as he could with exhausted gears, servos and internal mesh, and this time, he felt something shift inside of him—the sparkling was moving! His triumph was short-lived as a burning, tearing sensation shot through his valve. He screamed and screeched and dug long furrows into the top of the crate with his claws, but there was no further movement. The sparkling was stuck right at the entrance of his valve.

Stupid Megatron and his stupid fat helm!

He banished every other thought from his processor and forced himself to vent slow and even. He could do this—he could! He just needed to wait for the next contraction. So what if it hurt? So what if he felt like he was going to fall offline any second now? He was  _ not _ going to be defeated after all these years by a  _ newspark _ that  _ Megatron  _ had put in him!

The contraction came. Starscream gritted his denta together and  _ pushed _ , his strained grunt crescendoing into a scream of both pain and frustration until suddenly he felt the obstruction shift inside of him again. There was a sense of something moving and sliding fast—too fast—and he scrambled in a blind panic, certain that his sparkling was about to fall right out of him and crack its newborn helm on the floor of the storage room.

It did not, but his servos did close on something warm, wet, and distinctly helm-shaped protruding from his body—he was holding his sparkling’s helm! Just one more push and this should all be over.

More deep vents. Just wait, and…  _ PUSH! _

With a splash of fluids that he tried not to think about too hard, the sparkling slid free into his waiting servos.

For a moment, all Starscream could do was continue to vent, staring at the opposite wall without actually seeing it, and then he felt a small movement from the warm bundle of delicate armor he was holding.

He looked down.

The sparkling was nondescript and gray and covered in smears of its creator’s energon and amniotic fluids, but  _ Primus  _ was it beautiful—beautiful in ways that Starscream couldn’t begin to explain. Tiny limbs waved erratically, and a sound somewhere between a hoarse sob and a laugh escaped Starscream’s strained vocalizer.

He fell back on his aft and held the sparkling up in front of himself.

“Hey,” he whispered, swiping a careful digit across its perfect cheek. “Hey, you.” Without a spark scanner, it would take a while to figure out if it was a mech or a femme, but that didn’t much matter anyway at this point. 

The wrinkled derma around the newspark’s eyes crinkled even more, and its tiny mouth opened as though tasting the air of the world to see if it was worth sticking around for.

“Don’t worry; we’ll find somewhere better than this eventually,” Starscream promised.

And then, his sparkling’s optics opened for the first time. Deep crimson lights as vast as space itself yet sharp as…well, as sharp as Megatron’s optics, if he was being honest—stared up at him, and something in Starscream’s spark shifted forever.

He laid back on the floor, cradling his beautiful, fragile little newspark up against his cockpit, deciding that cleanup could wait until later.

“I wanted to meet you,” he whispered, stroking a servo over that tiny helm.

There it was—the reason he hadn’t been able to get rid of it. The second he’d realized he was carrying Megatron’s sparkling, there had been a part of him that knew he would die for the chance to meet the sparkling of the mech he loved. And he’d known he would have to leave because as much as he loved that old fool, he loved his and Megatron’s sparkling even more.

Starscream slipped a digit under one of the newspark’s tiny servos resting on his chest, and smiled as the delicate digits curled around his own.

If he had stayed, then even now, this sublime creation of theirs would probably be in his sire’s possessive servos, and Megatron would be making plans for how it would grow to succeed him and carry on in his path—to carry on the war. It was fine for Starscream and Megatron, and surely their sparkling  _ would _ have the potential to be a great warrior, but... 

Never, ever as long as he lived would Starscream let his sparkling feel that he had no choice in his life, bound by things like love and loyalty. No, his and Megatron’s creation would be free to do whatever it saw fit with its life, and he, Starscream, would protect that right with every beat of his spark. He would give every ounce of freedom he’d ever known to his sparkling..

...and neither of them would ever be alone again.

“Mission,” he murmured, fighting the urge to let his optics drop shut so that he could keep looking at his sparkling just a little longer. “Welcome to the world, Mission. Someday, I’ll bet you’ll rule it.”

Mission’s servo curled tighter on Starscream’s digit in reply.


End file.
